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Sandy relief bill heads to White House

This raises the question of whether this overlap runs afoul of provisions in the Stafford Act that prohibit FEMA from providing aid if other appropriations are already available for the same purpose. An administration official downplayed this danger but could offer no more detail.

The most updated scoring by the Congressional Budget Office pegs the bill at $50.5 billion, of which more than 80 percent, or $41.7 billion, will be counted as emergency appropriations outside the 2013 budget caps. Because so much of the Sandy package will go to capital projects, it will take years to spend out, and by the end of fiscal 2015, fully half of the outlays will remain, according to CBO.

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This makes the whole endeavor especially vulnerable to across-the-board spending cuts due to take effect March 1. And the Northeast stands to lose more than $2 billion to $3 billion.

For the Senate, Monday’s votes were the second time around on the Sandy debate and capped what has been weeks of wrangling between the two houses — and literally two Congresses.

Indeed, the Senate had approved its own Sandy package in the last days of the 112th Congress only to see Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) abruptly pull the bill from the House calendar and let it die. In the ensuing uproar, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie jumped in, chastising the speaker and personally lobbying his fellow Republicans to turn the political situation around. And with solid Democratic support and 49 Republicans, the Northeast prevailed Jan. 15, winning House passage of the bill adopted by the Senate Monday.

Together with a separate $9.7 billion flood insurance bill — already enacted — the total federal effort will roughly what the Senate had proposed in December. But there are significant refinements — and some real casualties.

New England lost in its bid to add millions in aid for the region’s depleted fishing industry. And despite the uproar over American casualties in Benghazi, Libya, the House chose to drop a Senate-passed provision allowing the Senate Department to transfer up to $1.1 billion to improve security at U.S. embassies around the world.

The money — originally budgeted for Iraq — is now sitting idle, and the administration had hoped to move it to higher priority projects in Lebanon and Zimbabwe, for example. The request had bipartisan support in both the House and Senate, but the language was dropped nonetheless because of fears in the House that it would invite criticism for straying too far from the mandate of helping only Sandy’s victims.